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Happy holidays from GosuGamers.net

A day before Christmas eve and a week before we bid 2013 farewell, we give our biggest thanks to all who made this an unforgettable year for GosuGamers.

Hello, GosuGamers community!

The winter holidays are upon us and we’re walking towards the end of 2013. It’s a time when people sit to make resolutions, ready themselves for a fresh start in January and be thankful to everyone that helped them through the past year. Coincidentally, it’s also a time to get drunk with family and friends, eat obscene amount of home-cooked meals and watch the fireworks through the alcohol haze which engulfs the last hours of 2013. But first things first – resolutions!

2013 was an exciting year for us. It had its ups and downs – maybe more than usual – but made for an interesting and joyful ride overall. In May, we launched GosuGamers v2, a project which consumed almost illegal amount of work hours from everyone involved. As much as we were comfortable with the familiar look of the old site, we realized our home needed a revamp, both visually and functionally, and build a new place from nothing.

To say the launch went perfectly would be a massive overstatement. There were bugs that needed cleaning, features were missing from both the front and back ends and many of you felt uncomfortable with the new design. We never blindly believed that such a massive undertaking would go sans issues but the number of things that needed fixing never seemed to stop growing.

Fortunately, that only made us work harder on the needed improvements. Coders, writers and coverage crew got together and as they filtered community feedback or provided one themselves, GosuGamers started to get better. In October, we launched the new and improved team profiles which now feature a well displayed player roster and Elo-change graphs, as well as the matchticker pages to provide even more information. Ten days ago, we remodeled the VOD page to look more like the old replays section, providing you with an easy way to search for games. All this came along with hot fixes, font changes and minor tweaks to create a better GG.net experience for readers and crewmembers alike.

Finding where Meepo was played last has never been easier

In the meantime, we continued to do what we do best – provide extensive ESPORTS coverage and that led to a stable growth of the site overall. The Dota 2 section remained our strongest asset, an asset that was taken to new heights this summer. In August during The International 3, we hit our all-time monthly peak at more than 1,300,000 ESPORTS fans.

Dota 2 was not all there was, however. As it welcomed more new people, the League of Legends section grew from nothing to a close group of friends that work daily to create fresh content, while the StarCraft 2 section switched its profile to emphasize even more on featured articles.

We also launched our own Dota 2 Wiki, a project that is very much a work in progress still but one that gets richer by the day. Expect more great things on that front in 2014 as the Wiki takes shape under the watchful command of Angel.

But enough resolutions, it’s time to give away some thank yous (in no particular order)!

Big thanks to the editorial crew for making GosuGamers the most frequently updated news site on the web. From January 1st till now, our editors published 3,774 news and 459 featured articles, which is more than ten news and one feature every single day, a truly outstanding feat.

Massive curtsey to our coverage crew, too, for keeping our matchticker always up to date, for drafting all those Dota and LoL games and for digging the internet for VODs to fill the archives. This year alone, we covered almost 370 tournaments (97 of which got their own coverage hub) and added 5,932 VODs. Since the launch of the new website in May, we logged more than 6,200 matches and you placed 175,600 bets.

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Last but not least, our final thank you goes to you – the people that read us every day, that visit us for the constant updates on their favorite games and for creating a vibrant GosuGamers community. Thanks to the old-timers that has been with us since we were called StarCraftGamers more than a decade ago and come to us for their daily dose of SC2. Thanks to those who supported our venture into Dota and helped bring the section to new records. Thanks to that part of our readership that believed in our League of Legends endeavor or read the Heroes of Newerth coverage. A community that stays with you through thick and thin is a rare breed and we’re glad to have you as our fans.

With that, my ramblings come to their end, much to your delight I suppose. The holidays await and it’s time for us to take a well-deserved rest. In that regard, expect a slower flow of content for the next couple of days, as only the most crazy of us will log in to do some work (i.e. do not be surprised to see ReiNNNN or me publish stuff). Expect our GosuAwards winners article in the last days of 2013 and we’ll return in full force for what should be an even better 2014.

Happy holidays, GG.net community, and may you have a memorable New Year’s celebration!